The invention relates to the field of optical detectors, and in particular to a multi-element superconducting nanowire single photon detector (MESNSPD) that includes multiple independently-biased superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) elements that form a continuous active area.
Optical detectors allow a measurement of the variation in the power or energy of the incident electromagnetic radiation with time. Some optical detectors can also provide information about other properties of the incoming electromagnetic radiation including its polarization, wavelength or equivalently frequency, positional variation as well as others. It is possible to use optical detectors that can not individually measure these other properties of the incident radiation to extract such information by externally directing the incoming radiation preferentially between multiple optical detectors. The response of the independent detectors can then be used to extract the desired information. While this approach has the advantage of allowing the desired information to be obtained using a wider range of optical detector technologies, potential disadvantages include: sensitivity losses, gaps in the measurement of continuously variable properties such as wavelength or positional variation, the size of such a detector, and the complexity of the coupling optics.